From the Head’s desk
I am happy to present the inaugural issue of the department newsletter to all of you. The past year has been eventful as we continue on our journey towards becoming a research powerhouse while maintaining our position as a department that produces top-flight computer scientists. Join us in this exciting journey.
Best wishes, S. Arun-Kumar
Recognition
- Sorav Bansal gets an unrestricted research grant from Microsoft Research towards helping to build a strong Systems Research Community in the country, under the “MSR India Virtual Centre 2017” initiative.
- Sayan Ranu’s work on algorithms for molecular synthesis is featured in The Hindu.
- Manjeet Dahiya wins First Place for his work on “Automatic Verification of Intermittent Systems” (which will appear in VMCAI 2018) at APLAS 2017 SRC Competition held from November 27-29, 2017 in Suzhou, China.
- Neha Sengupta’s paper “Benchmark Generator for Dynamic Overlapping Communities in Networks” (ICDE 2017, co-authors Michael Hamann and Dorothea Wagner) is declared Best Paper by the German Research Foundation (DFG) Priority Programme on Algorithms for Big Data.
Annual research symposium
Over two days, 7th and 8th December, senior PhD students presented their research. From AI and NLP, to Databases, Networks, Algorithms, Programming Languages and much more, the titles of these talks will be enough to give a good cross-section of the wide scope research going on in the department.
2017 in numbers
- BTech opening rank: 3. Closing rank: 104
- Dual opening rank: 78. Closing rank: 154
- New faculty joined: 1 (welcome Sayan Ranu!)
- PhDs graduated: 8.
- PhDs admitted: 8.
- Percentage of admitted PhDs with UG degrees from an IIT: 75.
- Money raised from alumni donations in rupees: 8,600,000.
Joining us this January: Rijurekha Sen
Rijurekha’s research interests lie in building distributed, networked and privacy-aware systems, focused on problems at the boundary of information technology and society.
Joining us this January: Rahul Narain
Rahul Narain’s research interests lie in numerical methods for computer graphics and animation, particularly focusing on efficient numerical optimization techniques for large-scale problems in physics-based animation and computational displays.
Notable alumni contribution
Alumnus Pankaj Gupta (BTech 1991) has donated Rs 40 Lakhs to endow three Young Faculty Awards for new faculty joining the department. Pankaj is currently Director of Engineering in the Next Billion Users team at Google. Thank you, Pankaj!
A visit by the 1989 Entry
This year it was the 1989-1993 batch who celebrated their silver jubilee. A nice afternoon of sharing thoughts about the past and the future culminated in this group photo.
Connecting with alumni
Prof Balakrishnan travelled to Bengaluru in June and the Bay Area in December to reconnect us to our alumni and to spread the word about the CSE Research Acceleration fund. The alumni came out in numbers at both events. After the Bay Area event, Bala had this to say: “Looking at the goodwill and respect, it felt good to be a teacher today!”
